Monday, October 8, 2012

Last week, I spoke twice on the relationship between science and religion (one time was to the undergraduate philosophy club at Virginia Tech and the other was to a sociology class.) This is the topic that I am currently planning on writing my graduate thesis in.

Both talks were meant to be broad overviews of several different perspectives on the relationship that one finds in the literature, without actually endorsing any particular perspective (with a pro/con provided for each view.) I've been asked by multiple people to make the lecture materials (slides & notes) available. I'm uploading them here so that everyone can enjoy them.

Many active participants in the atheist movement have noted how divisive the movement has become in recent history. I don't think it needs to be as divisive as it appears to be, and I rather openly dislike that some people have pejoratively called sexual harassment policies "too divisive". Often, this language of "divisiveness" is simply used to re-assert various kinds of privilege.

Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that there have been a large number of internal conflicts. For the most part, this has saddened me.

However, as Adam Lee has recently pointed out, it might not be altogether bad that these sorts of internal struggles have started. In his article "Atheism’s growing pains", which appeared in Saturday's edition of Salon, he argues that this divisive turn is necessary for the atheist movement to define itself as a cohesive political player:

In the last decade, atheism in America has risen from a tiny, demonized fringe to a serious presence in the public and political arenas... As the atheist movement gains numbers and prominence, it’s inevitably
been forced to confront questions about what it ultimately seeks to
accomplish. Some in the movement favor a narrowly defined set of goals:
defending the separation of church and state, keeping creationism out of
science classes, protecting atheists from job discrimination and
prejudice. But other atheists, while not opposing these goals, see
things more broadly. They note that the religious-right lawmakers who
promote creationism and state-church entanglements are also rabidly
opposed to equality or legal protection for LGBT people; try to ban
abortion and contraception, or throw obstacles in the path of women
seeking them; sermonize that global warming must be a hoax because God wouldn’t let the planet change that much;
advocate a social-Darwinian worldview where the rich have unlimited
power and the poor get nothing but societal neglect and harsh
repression... there’s a growing recognition that we have
problems within our own community — a realization that atheists, like
every other group of people, include sexual predators, bigots and
defenders of privilege, and that giving up religion doesn’t necessarily
erase these harmful attitudes.

"In
fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He had
three ships and left from Spain, he sailed prepared to exact some pain.
He brought lots of men who were looking for gold, the real history is
different from what you've been told. These greedy men brought diseases
and violence in their waves, then turned the proud natives into their
slaves. The natives were murdered and tortured, far from being his fans,
since he was only focused on finding riches and conquering their
lands." — David Shelby

Columnists Edward Blum and Paul Harvey have posted a fascinating (but short) look at the history of American artistic blasphemy in the New York Times. The article covers large territory in a short space, but should serve as an excellent place to start discussion on this topic. In the wake of the Islamic world's uproar over defamatory depictions of Muhammed, it serves us well to note that our own culture is not exempt from similar uproars:

More recently, there have been uproars over the Nigerian-British painter
Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary” and the New York artist and
photographer Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Mr. Serrano’s image of
Jesus on the crucifix, submerged in the artist’s own urine, roused a
crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts in the late 1980s.
Mr. Ofili’s painting of a dark-skinned Madonna with photographs of
vaginas surrounding her enraged Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The mayor,
who mistakenly claimed that elephant dung was smeared on the image when
it in fact was used at the base to hold the painting up, tried to ban it from being displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in 1999. (One upset Christian smeared white paint over it.)